Using publicly available search data to guide marketing strategy

Ice Lolly and Travel Supermarket merged in 2021 to become Ice Travel Group. There was large amounts of internal debate about how challenging this would be to achieve, and what was needed from a marketing perspective to return to previous levels of sales and revenue.

Using publicly available search data to guide marketing strategy

Challenges

As with most advertisers in the travel sector, Ice Lolly and Travel Supermarket suffered a loss of revenue during the Covid-19 crisis. The two brands merged in 2021 to become Ice Travel Group. The newly merged company’s marketing operation was challenged by a combination of furlough and a new organisation structure, which also led to a number of people leaving the team. 

 

As travellers began to emerge from COVID lockdowns, Icelolly.com and Travelsupermarket were looking for help to both merge and re-build their marketing operating model in the most effective way possible. Merging two enormous but differently structured accounts was made more complex by the need to modernise the setup to account for developments in best practice.  

Using publicly available search data to guide marketing strategy

Solution

Our Growth Sophistication Model is the gold standard for measuring marketing maturity and consumer experience. ​It evaluates each of the core competencies across an entire marketing operation, assessing existing capabilities and developing roadmaps, to transform a brand’s marketing into world-class, incremental growth.​

The Growth Sophistication Model evaluates 6 pillars​ 

The Growth Sophistication Model evaluates 6 pillars

By leveraging on the second pillar of our Growth Sophisitication Model, – Operating Model- our team of consultants first did a full review of the detailed setup and model used by Icelolly.com and Travelsupermarket – across all performance marketing channels. CvE’s expert resources played a key role to accelerate the building of our client’s performance marketing capability and enabled them to start recovering revenue as quickly as possible.  

From this information an optimal setup for both brands (as a combined entity) was designed. Crucially as many as possible existing accounts were repurposed into this new marketing operating model to maintain quality score and other concepts that take time to build up. By using API tools and structures our team was able to update both accounts seamlessly. Both tracking and tagging were also upgraded to best in breed status. 

At the same time a new operational design for ICT groups was developed by CvE. 

To ensure optimal results, we worked with ICT teams to manage the transition and the early stages of the operation before handing over as part of an in-housing exercise to the regrowing new operational design.

Using publicly available search data to guide marketing strategy

Results

By re-engineering the org design and implementing martech solutions, CvE enabled ITG to relaunch marketing post-pandemic, achieving a 30x increase in scale and a 10x lift in revenue from marketing initiatives over a 12 month period, whilst maintaining positive ROI. This impacted top line business activity, significantly increasing shareholder value – a key boardroom metric that ultimately informed transformation objectives. The work represented a 400% return on the investment into CvE’s services, validating the outlay into the partnership. 

ICE Lolly ATL Spend vs SoS

 

Using publicly available search data to guide marketing strategy

Testimonial

Richard Stringer ITG’s chief executive had the following to say 

“The pandemic and lockdown measures brought unprecedented challenges to our business. Working with CvE has been essential for us at ITG to redefine our marketing operations to face this totally new landscape. With significant improvements in the way we plan, execute, and measure our paid media efforts, identify best performing marketing channels, and tie bottom of the funnel to top of the funnel activity, ITG Group is in a much stronger place now and on the right path to own a marketing model fit for the future.”

Richard Singer - Chief Executive ITG